That pigs are smart
and sensitive is not in doubt. How can we justify continuing to kill
them for food?

Domestic
pigs, the kind portrayed in hot-pink neon above barbecue joints,
curly tailed and carefree, have prodigious memories. In
problem-solving with computers, they match wits with little kids and
win. They are able to plan ahead, and they live in complex social
communities. They recognise other pigs as distinct individuals.

Pigs
aren’t just cerebral, though: they have heart. When others are
in distress, they can express concern and act with empathy. A
description of pig behaviours, derived from scientific experiments
and compiled
by Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and
Christina M Colvin at Georgia Institute of Technology is so
impressive, you might think it was about chimpanzees, elephants or
whales.

We
eat pigs, though, and we eat them on a scale unparalleled in
comparison with the rate at which we consume other brainy mammals.
According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture
Organization, pork
is the most consumed meat in the world.

Barbecue is a
cultural obsession in many countries, as is bacon, whether served
straight up or in more recent innovations such as bacon chocolate and
bacon vodka. Plus, once satiated with real bacon, some might even
retire to bed after brushing with bacon-flavoured toothpaste.

We value the taste
of pigs far more than we value the lives of pigs. Exceptions include
pig celebrities, whose personalities are known and cherished, and
whom we assign to a different, protected, pet-like non-consumable
status. Esther, a 650 lb ‘wonder pig’ who lives in a
house with Derek Walter and Steve Jenkins in Ontario, Canada, is a
‘public figure’ on Facebook with more than 1.1 million
followers.

Or
consider Christopher Hogwood (named after the famed English conductor
and musicologist), a pig who lived in a barn at the home of Sy
Montgomery and Howard Mansfield in New Hampshire from his infancy
until his death at age 14. Christopher grew to a size even larger
than Esther, and through Montgomery’s memoir The
Good Good Pig
(2006) became a poster pig for porcine cognition and emotion.

Montgomery
describes how a belly rub in the sun from her, or dinner leftovers
from a local chef, plunged Christopher into a state of utter delight
visible to all: he telegraphed this rapture through sound
(‘unh-unh-unh!’) and body posture. At those moments, he
became the ultimate mindful mammal, one who dwelled entirely in the
present. But Christopher didn’t live only
in the present any more than we do. He built nests, not in a rote
instinctual way, but in fussy anticipation of his own needs for
soft-hay comfort. His memory for individual humans – his own
complex social community – was excellent. Two young children,
once neighbours, continued to visit him at irregular intervals even
after they moved to another state. ‘He still remembered the
little girls next door,’ Montgomery told me, ‘when they
had been away not only for a pretty long time, but during a period of
adolescent growth in which just a few months will make a big
difference – in what you look like, how tall you are, what your
voice sounds like, what you smell like.’ Christopher’s
‘voice became softer and lower’ when interacting with
people who were visibly sad, a feat of perspective-taking that
suggests an empathy response.

Of course,
storytelling about pigs as individuals invites people to think
differently about pork and bacon. But what does science – the
kind of science reviewed by Marino and Colvin – say? That
question has preoccupied me for several years.

Some
science begins with the presumption that pigs are not particularly
intelligent or empathetic animals. Two years ago, a group of swine
researchers led by the animal scientist Sophie Brajon then at the
Université Laval in Quebec published the paper
‘The Way Humans Behave Modulates the Emotional State of
Piglets’. The research is part of a corpus showing that the
emotional state of animals, including farmed animals, biases their
information-processing. Yet the conclusion reached, that gently
handled pigs showed more positive emotional states than roughly
handled or neglected ones, conveys a larger message: that we have a
way to go before it’s the starting point, not the big reveal,
that farmed animals have emotions and are affected by how we treat
them.

A
good deal of the science writing on pigs aims to increase awareness
of pigs’ capacities so that they are treated better. The
biologist Donald Broom and colleagues at the University of Cambridge
discovered
that pigs, with only five hours of experience, can use a mirror to
find the location of a hidden object. Mirror-naïve pigs search
behind
the mirror to find the treat, but after five hours’ practice,
10 of 11 pigs turned away to find the real location of the savoury
items within 23 seconds. (A fan blew the food smells away, so that
smell cues didn’t confound the process.) This is a cognitive
feat because both the concept of the food and its position must be
remembered, as interpreted from the non-real-world view of the
mirror.

In one study, the
pigs were better than the toddlers at moving a joystick (by snout) to
a target

Pig cognition is
formidable. The biologist Candace Croney at Purdue University in
Indiana described the cognitive research she’d done on pigs as
a graduate student. She wasn’t, at the start, expecting much:
‘My understanding of pigs was that they were dumb, dirty
animals,’ she said. The names she bestowed on her study
subjects suggested she wasn’t expecting much in the way of
cognitive ability. She called one pair of pigs Pork and Beans,
another Hamlet and Omelette, and another, inevitably, Bacon and Eggs.

Croney’s
careful research proved her low expectations wrong. In an ingenious
experiment, she and her colleagues carried wooden blocks shaped into
Xs and Os around the pigs. Only the O carriers fed the pigs. The pigs
soon followed the O and not the X carriers – not exactly a
surprise. Next, the researchers, no longer carrying wooden blocks,
wore T-shirts marked with either Xs or Os, and the pigs transferred
their knowledge to a new situation: they approached only the
O-wearers. They ‘got’ the meaning of the symbol,
flattened to two dimensions from three.

Croney also tested
the pigs, along with young human children, on a computer exercise.
The goal was to move a joystick to a target – by snout for the
porcine study participants, by hand for the small-human ones. The
pigs were better at it than the toddlers.

It
is useful to know that pigs can and do reason out problems. But
recent science, and storytelling, is also revealing that pigs have a
running internal narrative going on. They reflect on what happens to
them, and what the past meant. Indeed, they think, they feel, they
solve problems, they exhibit individuality. Should we be eating pigs
at
all?

What
mental or emotional feats would pigs need to pull off for people to
stop eating them? Perhaps, though, this is not quite the right
question. Turning pigs into food is a culturally embedded practice,
bound up with tradition and family. No anthropologist would seriously
argue that pig-eating could ever be eradicated. Further, even animals
primarily identified as pets aren’t always kept out of the
cooking pot, as the annual Yulin dog-meat festival in Guangxi, China,
shows. And as
the history of cannibalism reveals, it’s not only in
extreme survival situations – such as a remote plane crash or
when a mountaineering group becomes stranded – that we eat our
companions. In the historical practice of Chinese filial piety,
people chopped off a limb and served it with rice porridge to a
cherished relative who was starving or ill, as a mark of devotion.
During the Renaissance, European medical practices included the
ingestion of others’ bodily substances.

But pigs suffer on
an astounding scale on their way to our tables. Of the 100 million
pigs annually raised for food in the United States, 97 per cent are
confined to factory farms. These farms or CAFOs (concentrated
animal-feeding operations) can best be described as ‘huge
lagoons of pig sewage’. These farms do great environmental
harm, and the pigs there endure short, miserable lives.

A
worker stationed in a slaughterhouse ‘blood pit’ who was
interviewed by Jonathan Safran Foer for his book Eating
Animals
(2009) describes the culture of aggression that arises in
slaughterhouses. Often it is not enough to merely kill the pig. ‘You
go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own
blood. Split its nose,’ said Foer’s informant. ‘A
live hog would be running around the pit,’ he said. ‘It
would just be looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would
just take my knife and – eerk – cut its eye out while it
was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream.’ This
is not the work of an occasional sociopath, it’s representative
of the embedded cultural practice of cruelty and violence in
slaughterhouses.

iAnimal:
Through the Eyes of a Pig
(2016) is a 12-minute virtual reality film co-produced by Animal
Equality and Condition One that immerses its viewers in a Mexican
slaughterhouse.
Two pigs are hit in the skull with a metal bolt stunner. They drop to
the floor but soon regain some degree of consciousness, and slowly
bleed to death. Then, the next two pigs are forced forward up the
killing chute.

We
shouldn’t eat pigs. But many of us still do. Is
there something about knowing that our food plans, reflects and
remembers that could compel more people, many more, to stop?

The evidence that
other animals express emotions is simply abundant, and strong

In
a recent letter to The
New York Times Magazine’s
resident ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah, a person asked whether it’s
a good idea to adopt a pet from a no-kill shelter. In answering,
Appiah made a throwaway comment that revealed the lingering problem,
even among the highly educated. ‘Human beings, unlike other
creatures,’ he said, ‘have lives they’re making
whose interruption deprives them of something significant.’ To
answer ‘No’ to the question Should
we eat pigs at all?
might require a willingness to accept that pigs too have something
valuable to lose if we slaughter them.

We know – from
science and storytelling – that Appiah is wrong, that humans
are not the only animals whose lives include emotions, cognition,
memory, attachments and more. Many animals, ranging from elephants
and monkeys to ducks, mourn when a relative or close friend dies.
They withdraw socially, or fail to eat or behave in the ways they had
before. The evidence that other animals express emotions is simply
abundant, and strong.

Anthropomorphism
is usually defined as the inappropriate attribution of human
qualities, capacities or emotions to other animals. But it’s
not accurate to claim, as an a
priori
assumption, that happiness or grief (or profound intelligence) is
human, and only human. Many people recognise the thinking minds and
feeling hearts of the dogs and cats with whom they live. But pigs?

In
Foer’s Eating
Animals,
Bill Niman, who founded Niman Ranch north of San Francisco, describes
an early attempt at farming when he was in his 20s. It was agonising,
at first, thinking about whether it was okay to slaughter a pig. ‘But
in the weeks that followed,’ he writes, ‘as we, our
friends, and family ate the pork from that pig, I realised that the
pig had died for an important purpose – to provide us with
delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious food.’ It’s a
distressing perspective on another sentient being’s life.

In May, animal
activists rejoiced when Anita Krajnc, the founder of Toronto Pig
Save, was acquitted of ‘criminal mischief’ charges for
offering water to some of the 190 pigs riding in a truck on the way
to an Ontario slaughterhouse in 2015. Krajnc’s compassionate
response – echoed every day in places such as Farm Sanctuary in
New York and California, or Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood,
Washington – isn’t mainstream, but it could be. Krajnc is
showing us another way of seeing and acting toward pigs – a
better way.

All
pigs, domestic Hogwood types and wild boars alike, are members of a
single species, Sus
scrofa.
Currently, all are dealt with harshly. There are more than 2 million
wild boars in Texas, and they can be highly destructive to the
landscape. After public outcry, a plan to poison them has been put on
hold. The pigs would have been fed warfarin, which causes internal
and external bleeding to the point of death. Yet, a report on the
proposal in The
New York Times
this April gives the sense that grievous harm to the pigs was the
least of all concerns. Worries about ‘collateral damage’
to people, wildlife and pets was a significant factor. Hunters
worried about the loss of a prized prey animal.

Some humans today
hunt, but no one, properly speaking, is a carnivore. We are not like
big cats locked in by evolution to stalk and consume gazelles, or
house cats who can’t thrive on vegetarian or vegan diets. We’re
not even obligate omnivores. At the species level, there’s no
biological reason why we must eat meat, as long as we can supplement
plant proteins with vitamin B12.

When a perspective
shift on pigs does happen, our view of food could correspondingly
transform. During my call to Montgomery about Christopher Hogwood,
she imagined addressing a notional pig consumer: ‘That ham
sandwich you’re eating could have grown up and done as much for
some other family as Christopher did for me, but instead became a
passing flavour on somebody’s tongue. It just seems such a sad,
terrible waste.’ Here is a 180-degree turn away from the view
of a pig’s life as existing to please, even for a moment, human
beings. Once this perspective-change happens, eating a pig looks like
what it is: an ‘absurd, criminal waste of a life for just one
meal’, in the apt words of the Swiss primatologist Christophe
Boesch.

Based on everything
we know about pigs’ capacities to think and feel, it’s
reasonable to conclude that a domestic pig would choose to live
longer than those six months in a CAFO. Susie Coston, Farm
Sanctuary’s national shelter director, has worked with rescued
pigs for more than 20 years. She told me:

Knowing the
incredibly social, intelligent and outdoor-loving animals that they
are, to think of them spending a moment of time locked in a gestation
crate or housed in a warehouse seems impossible. Many of the hundreds
of pigs I have had the pleasure of knowing live into their mid- to
late-teens and enjoy rich, fulfilling lives with either their own
families or those they adopt and form a herd with. They experience
joy, love, loss and pain, and if allowed to live life instead of
being slaughtered at six months, they can spend well over a decade
enjoying each day to the fullest.

Does an
understanding of the inner lives of farmed animals, forged from
science and storytelling about individual animals’ lives, help
people to think harder about whom they eat?

We don’t yet
know for sure. But new research by leading psychologists tells us two
things: that people are less likely to perceive as food those animals
that they believe to be intelligent; and, conversely, animals that
are seen as food are perceived to be less capable of suffering and
less deserving of moral concern.

Such research
results point to a daunting challenge for pig advocates and animal
activists. As the world continues to industrialise, more and more
people are getting the opportunity to eat meat, and they like it. At
the same time, the conviction that moves activists – that the
lives of pigs and other animals also matter – means that, with
every pork meal averted, suffering is averted, and we’re one
step closer to saving a life.

That pigs suffer in
our food system is certain – as is the fact that they think and
feel emotions. It’s up to us now to think of that as enough.
It’s up to us to think and feel differently about pigs.